88 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



down the river. When we uncovered these bones 

 we found them very brittle, as they had been shat- 

 tered by the uplift of the strata in which they were 

 buried; and we were obliged to devise some means 

 of holding them in place. The only thing we had 

 in camp that could be made into a paste was rice, 

 which we had brought along for food. We boiled 

 quantities of it until it became thick, then, dipping 

 into it flour bags and pieces of cotton cloth and bur- 

 lap, we used them to strengthen the bones and hold 

 them together. This was the beginning of a long 

 line of experiments, which culminated in the re- 

 cently adopted method of taking up large fossils by 

 bandaging them with strips of cloth dipped in plas- 

 ter of Paris, like the bandages in which a modern 

 surgeon encases a broken limb. 



I feel it a great privilege to have been one of the 

 original discoverers of these great horned dinosaurs, 

 whose skeletons are now among the chief glories 

 of our museums. 



One day, about the fifteenth of October, Professor 

 Cope, who had been anxiously awaiting the arrival 

 of the last steamboat, concluded to ride out on the 

 open prairie to some bad lands which we had seen 

 on our journey down from Dog Creek. I accom- 

 panied him. On the way he fell into one of his fre- 

 quent absent-minded moods, picturing the land as it 





